Friday, May 9, 2008

In the area of link building, there are many important factors to remember. After all, link building is the single most important part of achieving a high-ranking website in modern search engines. As such, there are many things that can significantly impact the growth and spread of links to your site:

• Make sure your site has something that other webmasters in your niche would be interested in linking to.

• Create content that people will be willing to link to, even if it is not directly easy to monetize. These linkworthy pages will lift the authority and rankings of all pages on your site.

• Create something that legitimate webmasters interested in your topic would be interested in linking to. • When possible, try to get your keywords in many of the links pointing to your pages.

• Register with, participate in, or trade links with topical hubs and related sites. Be in the discussion or at least be near the discussion.

• Look for places from which you can get high-quality free links (like local libraries or chambers of commerce).

• If you have some good internal content, try to get direct links to your inner pages.

• Produce articles and get them syndicated to more authoritative sites.

• Start an interesting and unique blog and write about your topics, products, news, and other sites in your community.

• Comment on other sites with useful relevant and valuable comments.

• Participate in forums to learn about what your potential consumers think is important. What questions do they frequently have? How do you solve those problems?

• Issue press releases with links to your site.

• Leave glowing testimonials for people and products you really like. Oftentimes when the product owner or person posts the testimonials, they will include a link back to your site.

• Mix your link text up. Adding words like buy or store to the keywords in your some of your link text can make it look like more natural linkage data and help you rank well for many targeted secondary phrases.

• Survey your vertical and related verticals. What ideas/tools/articles have become industry standard tools or well-cited information? What ideas are missing from the current market space that could also fill that niche?

• If you have a large site, make sure you create legitimate reasons for people to want to reference more than just your home page.

• If you are looking to hire an SEO, you may want to look at http://www.honestseo.com or feel free to ask me to recommend you to someone.

• Brett Tabke (owner of WebmasterWorld) wrote a quick guide worth looking at before building your site: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/2010.htm